Reconciling diverging frequency effects in inflectional defectiveness: A study of Peninsular Spanish verbs

Abstract

In his study of defective Spanish verbs, Albright (2003) found speakers’ form judgments to be positively correlate with lexeme frequency. For defective French verbs, however, speakers’ judgments are negatively correlated with lexeme frequency (Copot & Sims 2025). What is the source of these diverging observations? We test the role of methodological choices by using Copot & Sims’s experimental design to investigate Spanish verbal defectiveness. The results confirm Albright’s findings, but only for the subset of verbs drawn from his study. We briefly consider implications for the phenomenology of defectiveness.